When CD Projekt Red announced their next Witcher game, we didn’t get any details, except the fact that they would be using Unreal Engine 5 this time rather than their own in-house REDengine 4. CDPR actually had its own segment with the recent State of Unreal stream, and we get a reason for why they decided to make the change.
During the stream (via IGN), CDPR CTO Pawel Zawodny explained, “It was the shift towards open world support that brought Unreal Engine 5 to our attention… This opens a new chapter for us where we really want to see how our experience in building open-world games gets combined with all the engineering power of Epic.”
Despite the shift in engine for The Witcher, CDPR has confirmed that they will still be using the same REDengine 4 when it comes to improvements and additions to Cyberpunk 2077. Hopefully that doesn’t mean that Cyberpunk won’t be getting as much support in the future, as the game is only starting to get picked back up by the audience.
Game director Jason Slama also had this to say about using the Unreal Engine 5 for Witcher:
“One of the things that is really important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games versus, let’s say, linear games is the possibilities of the things that can go wrong or the scenarios that you have to consider are exponentially higher than linear games… Players can go in whatever direction they want, they can handle content in any order that they want theoretically, and to really encapsulate that means that you need a really stable environment where you can be able to make changes with a high level of confidence that it’s not going to break in 1,600 other places down the line.”
We don’t know what the next Witcher game will look like yet, but hopefully we can get a new trailer before the year ends.
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